Experimenting Farmers and Agricultural Research

Mende farmers believe that trials and tests of this sort are a long-established element in indigenous culture, even if from time to time the better-travelled among them helpfully point to parallels with trials they have seen on government or university experimental farms. European agricultural officers were reporting experimentation on local farms in the 1930s and 1940s and thought it perfectly feasible that this pre-dated colonial rule. A number of agriculturalists have recently begun to explore the idea that indigenous inventiveness provides an effective point of contact between scientific research in tropical agriculture and potential groups of small-farmer clients. Varietal trials are the stock-in-trade of much agricultural research. The idea of involving farmers in trials is not a new one. A key issue in promoting complementary methods is whether it is possible to enrich existing experimental methodologies in order to cope with the levels of complexity normally encountered by small-scale farmers in high-risk environments.